Pennsylvania has the largest population of German-Americans and is home to one of the group’s original settlements, Germantown in 1683. The state has 3.5 million people claiming German ancestry -- more than in Berlin. Allegheny County, which includes Pittsburgh, has 348,979 German-Americans, according to the census.

What? No mention of Hessians?

People forget now, but Bloomfield was once a very German neighborhood. Supplanted by Italians and Sicilians who came later. Of course the article gets to the bigger story that the mass of European migrants that came to Pittsburgh a century go are not coming in the same numbers now. US migration is mostly Hispanic and we continue to rank near last in any measure of Hispanic migration into the Pittsburgh region. That is especially true of core urban areas here and across the nation which have long depended on international migration to sustain population as long time residents inevitably move to suburbs and beyond. Despite folks trying to spin the Forbes story yesterday as saying something about city population, the Forbes data has nothing on city population to be clear, there can't be much net population growth in the city until there is a larger flow of international immigrants. Just the way the math works out virtually everywhere in urban America.

1 Comments:

BrianTH said...

Random sidenote, but that Germanization of Western PA is part of why we really are distinct from the Southwest parts of Appalachia (where people who claim "American" ancestry, which mostly means Scots-Irish, remain dominant).